


only in darkness can you see the stars

by KatRoma



Series: of pinwheels and paper daffodils [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Female Uchiha Sasuke, Gen, Gender Roles, Gift Fic, POV Sasuke, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-27
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-03 12:45:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2851247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatRoma/pseuds/KatRoma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No matter who or where you are, the world will find a use for you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. on the eve of rebirth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shayna_Nak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayna_Nak/gifts).



> This is a belated Christmas present spawned by a conversation with a friend about my other story on this site. I don't know how Shay got genderswap out of it, but here, have a genderswapped Sasuke.
> 
> I apologize in advance for a very screwed up timeline. I also tamper a lot with the Sharingan, since it's so important to plot.

Today Uchiha Sasuke turns seven.

It’s hot, late in July, and there’s something sweet on the breeze—baking goods, bonfire smoke, afternoon sunshine. Mother’s busy, Father’s out working, and Itachi brings her to a riverside town not far outside the walls. If their parents knew, they’d be rigid with disapproval. “Do you think I’ll graduate this year?” Sasuke asks as she walks along a long bridge railing, holding his hand for support. “Like you?”

At seven, Itachi became a genin, but at seven, Sasuke is a mess of black hair, and spindly limbs. Her hair never falls in perfect straight lines the way Mother’s does, even now frizzing in the summer heat, and she’s taken to wearing her brother’s hand-me-downs in an effort to stop growing out of her clothes so quickly. In result, her shirts and shorts are always just a size too big, making her arms and legs seem thinner in comparison. Shisui says she looks like a straw doll. She’s more a little girl than Itachi was ever a little boy, and people notice. They comment.

Unlike the chuunin at the Academy, her brother has all the brutal honesty of anyone in their family. “Kunoichi have more lessons than their male counterparts,” he tells her. He walks across the wooden ground, and on the other side of her is the river. In the light of the sunset, the water glows red, the color of her bloodright. “You likely won’t until nine the earliest.”

Etsuko-sensei says that kunoichi are shinobi first, as they’re one in the same, women second, and their lessons are meant to show them how to be both. Sasuke doesn’t care much for learning how to turn femininity into a weapon when she has so many others at her disposal. There’s something comforting about sharp edges and bursts of fire, and the effects they leave; the subtlety of kunoichi studies is lost on her.

“Oh,” is all she says, and goes back to concentrating on her balance.

This is Uchiha Sasuke, age seven, and she has four more months until her life begins.

 

 

Though they’re too old for it, and Sasuke knows that, but whenever Itachi returns from a long mission, she still curls up with him on his first night back.

He doesn’t seem to mind, but it bothers their parents. “I know you miss him,” Mother says, back turned as she slices dehydrated seaweed into strips, “but he’s so tired when he returns. He doesn’t need to entertain his little sister.”

Most days, nights are the only time Itachi and Sasuke can really talk to each other. Besides, he’d tell her if he didn’t want her there. “But—”

“You’re seven, Sasuke. You should have enough restraint to wait until morning.” If Itachi were willing to spend time with her during the day, she would, but she’s lucky if she can get him into be with her for more than a couple of hours at once lately. “Come here, dear. Help me with the tofu.”

When he was seven, Itachi had graduated the Academy and became a gennin. The best Sasuke can do is spend time with her mother in the kitchen, making dinner and trying to ignore the sound of the fan rattling the windowpanes. “Mother,” she says as she stands, accepting the knife held out to her, even though she can barely reach the counter, “why did you stop going on missions?”

With a small smile, Mother answers, “Because I had Itachi,” and Sasuke wishes she’d just been born a boy.

 

 

Sometimes Shisui smiles, and he looks happy and sad all at the same time. “What do all of these mean?” he says, nodding to the pile of flowers Sasuke has next to her. “Are they for school?”

Itachi is gone for the next week on another mission, and Shisui is acting as her watcher instead. Though her parents don’t mind much if she wanders around alone, her brother and cousin want her to stay with someone older than her when she can manage, because it’s not safe for girls the way it is for boys. She feels bad, forcing Shisui so far out into the woods, but it’s easier to think here than in the compound where there’s always something to hear or see. Unlike her brother, Sasuke’s attention span is very short, and she’s easily distracted.

“I need to make an arrangement addressed to someone,” she says, “which means I can’t make it up. Everyone else is gonna do their parents.”

“Why don’t you?”

“What would I say to them?”

He doesn’t have an answer. Instead he says, “Do it for me.”

If Itachi were here, she’d address it to him, but Shisui isn’t a terrible replacement. That’s all she is to him, too, until her brother gets back. That’s all she ever is to anyone.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, she collects too many scrapes and bruises to be anything more than something less than average.

Flower arranging, unlike weaponry or ninjutsu, is just memorization, but Sasuke’s not the type of girl to write love letters to boys. Her creativity manifests in strategy, or how best to avoid her parents on days she’s done something particularly disappointing. Crafting something meaningful through imagery rather than words isn’t something she’s good at. Etsuko-sensei’s noticed. Yesterday Sasuke had to sit through a lecture on how she needs to focus her studying on more than what her brother can teach her.

“Well, I need at least four,” she says, picking up a bluebell, “and they all need to look good together. This means gratitude. So, I’m grateful for your thoughtfulness—” She selects a pansy, white. In truth, whether Shisui can be considered thoughtful or not is debatable. “—which I also respect you for.” Then comes the daffodil. “I’ll use white again. Are you going on a mission soon?”

“Two days from now. Why?”

As she takes the one white sweetpea she has from the bottom of the pile, she answers, “And goodbye.”

They tie the small bundle together with some twine thread he has for his shuriken before he picks her up, putting her over his back the way Itachi does. “Watch your elbows,” he says. “They’re pointy enough to hurt.”

When they leave, the unwanted flowers stay behind. The ones in her hand she’ll keep in water until morning, and maybe now Etsuko-sensei will stop telling her to act more like a girl.

 

 

Simply by her nature, Sasuke doesn’t have any real friends. She has an expectation she needs to live up to, and doesn’t have time for them. But Haruno Sakura, a classmate who sits next to her on lecture days, is nice enough, and sometimes whoever’s picking her up is late, too, so they wait together after school for their respective grownups.  

“Hitomi called me Forehead Girl today,” she says one day as they sit on a low wall outside the Academy steps, facing the street. “My forehead isn’t really that big, is it?”

“No way,” Sasuke says. “They’re just jealous ‘cause your hair’s pretty.”

It really is, too, and she’d be lying if she said she weren’t a little jealous herself.  Over the years, she’s realized that there’s this general belief that all Uchiha are supposed to be attractive, but maybe that only applies to boys. She’s the first daughter in several generations, and her parents were so surprised they couldn’t even think to give her a girl’s name. Alternatively, Sakura’s name fits her so perfectly it makes a person wonder if her mother can see the future.

Sakura frowns. “No, they’re not,” she says. “You’re lucky. Everyone likes you.”

That’s accurate for their classmates, but not for anyone else in her life. What Sakura doesn’t know is that she’s lucky her parents are proud when she comes home carrying high scores. “My brother says mean people don’t deserve attention,” Sasuke tells the other girl.

“Yeah, but that’s kind of hard when we go to school with them all the time.”

With a shrug, Sasuke says, “You have me.”

As Sakura is clanless, both her parents perpetual gennin, Sasuke’s own wouldn’t approve of their half hearted friendship, but when the other girl smiles, she smiles back anyway.

 

 

October brings about the end of this year’s Konoha chuunin exams, and the festival appears in Konoha within the hour. Father says Sasuke can’t go because she’s too young, so Itachi says he’ll bring her, and Mother dresses her in a light blue kimono with  pale gold orchids, and a pin with sakura flowers stuck in her bun. Though she doesn’t remember the last Konoha chuunin exam, Sasuke knows they’re a big deal, and this is a big deal, which means there’ll be fireworks over the lake.

For a Hidden Village, Konoha is exceptionally colorful, Itachi and Shisui tell her, but tonight it’s brighter than most. Yukata aren’t traditionally that noticeable, and the boys fade to the background. For once, it’s the girls on display, running around in their yellows and pinks and greens. Sakura is holding hands with her mother, wearing matching kimono of red and white. It’s one of the few instances where everyone sheds their clan emblems, too, and Sasuke can’t tell who’s who just from a quick look at their back.

Within the first half hour, Itachi buys them cherry sweet ice to share, and her a pinwheel of twisted origami paper—purple on the outside, silver revealed whenever the wind twirls it.  “You’re being really nice to me, nii-san,” she says, clutching his hand in hers and following him through the crowds. “What did I do?”

Being bad at everything means their parents are disappointed more often than not, and poor scores have lead to her getting in trouble over it more than once. It’s not unusual for Itachi to try and make it up to her. “You haven’t done anything wrong, Sasuke,” he says, and she’s not sure she believes him. “It’s a beautiful night. Enjoy it.”

“Why aren’t you with Kimiko-san?”

Yukimori Kimiko is Itachi’s new, and first, girlfriend, and Sasuke tells herself she isn’t jealous. “Because,” Itachi answers, “I’m spending the night with my nosy little sister.”

The first fireworks go off, high above the trees, exploding into green and gold. There’s nothing wrong with Kimiko, because she’s kind and friendly and a brilliant kunoichi who doesn’t have to wear hand-me-down clothes that make her look like a straw doll. Like Itachi, she’s thirteen, only a couple months older than him. There’s nothing wrong with her, expect there is, because he’s here so rarely already, and she takes up time.

For now, Sasuke puts Kimiko out of her mind, and focuses of enjoying the fireworks with her brother. “I’m not that nosy,” she says, and blows at the pinwheel so hard it spins, making a sound like a kunai cutting through the air.

 

 

Shisui used to say Sasuke looks like a straw doll. After his funeral, the comparison becomes all that more appropriate. Though she doesn’t know much about dolls from personal experience, she shares classes with Hyuuga Hinata. All dolls are just set pieces in the end, but the cheap, secondhand aren’t taken out until the nice one is broken.

Even though she doesn’t understand entirely what happened, and no one will explain anything, she knows that for some reason, the rest of her family thinks Itachi caused Shisui’s suicide. This is ridiculous, as anyone who knows him will say, but the attention is enough to make Father wary. With no other children, he’s forced to turn his attention to his daughter, the second child, the prodigal son’s on-sale replacement.

It’s early in the morning, and they stand together on the dock overlooking the water. “You saw how to do it,” he says after demonstrating the family Kanton. “It’s your turn now.”

The direction of the wind means they’re still surrounded by a cloud of smoke, but the Uchiha family blackened their lungs against the effects of fire a long time ago, Father says. Still, her eyes sting, and when she fails on her first try, she wonders if that means there’s something wrong with her.

Father sighs, and walks away. “It was too much to hope for two,” she hears him say, and jumps into the lake the moment he’s gone.

According to Itachi, water is the only time of nature transformation that can overpower fire. She holds herself below the surface until her lungs burn, and the pain blocks out the sound of her father’s voice echoing in her head.

 

 

A week later, and Sasuke succeeds. After, it’s Itachi she gets, not Father.

“You’re very good, Sasuke,” he says. “Not many people can learn this at seven.”

“You did, on your first try,” she says, and her brother’s smile is thin. “Can you stay, nii-san? Please? You promised to—”

Then his fingers are there, poking hard at her forehead. “Tomorrow,” he says as she rubs the sore spot. “Wait for me in the clearing.”

With that, he’s gone, and she heads home with smoke rather than water caught in her lungs.

 

 

Itachi doesn’t come, so she walks back to the compound, and smells blood before she enters the gate.

What she discovers is her family, dead, in a trail leading to the main house. She doesn’t need to examine closely or see faces to know who everyone is, but she doesn’t allow herself time to panic or grieve. She knows without really knowing that her parents and Itachi aren’t among the dead. All that matters now is finding them. After that, she can let herself feel everything.

As she reaches the front door of her house, she catches sight of a figure on an electrical pole, crouched down with red eyes reflecting the moonlight. Before she can react, Itachi’s voice calls, “Sasuke, don’t!” from inside.

For the first time in years, she ignores him, too afraid to do anything else, and pulls open the door. The scene she walks into isn’t what she expected, and she thought she was done with surprises for the night.

Itachi runs the blade of his katana across Mother’s throat at the same moment Sasuke enters, and she drops heavy to the ground over Father’s body. “Itachi,” Sasuke hears herself say. “Itachi.”

The genjutsu hits her suddenly. She falls out of time, watches the killings through her brother’s eyes for hours, and wakes gasping on the floor as he walks right past her. It felt like hours, but it was over so fast she didn’t have time to scream.

 

 

On a certain level, Sasuke knows it makes little sense. On another, she knows she’s right. She catches up with her brother before he’s even left the compound. “This isn’t you,” she says, and he turns. “Who’s making you do it?”

There’re tears running down his face. “No one,” he answers. “I wanted to. I’d kill you, too, if you were worth killing.”

“No, you wouldn’t, you’re my brother, you—” She stops. In the corner of her vision, she can see Kimiko's body, run through. Then, desperate, “Take me with you.”

His eyes flash, but her world is clear as day, bright in the same overexposed way the festival was, tinted red, and she sees the genjutsu as it comes. Instinctively, she deflects it, and in the last moment, hears her brother say, “No, Sasuke, it isn’t developed!”

Then the world is black and painful, and Sasuke is so very, very afraid.

 

 

The man on the electrical pole’s name is Uncle Madara.

He isn’t really Sasuke’s uncle, of course, but he’s family, and it’s the only thing they can think of for her to call him. Even though he doesn’t like that Itachi brought her along, he doesn’t complain about it in front of her. “It’s a big and beautiful world out there, Sasuke,” he tells her on the fifth day when they’re to go their separate ways. “Build up your chakra reserves so you can see it.”

“Then will you let me see your face, Ojisan?” she asks, and though both he and Itachi say she’ll be able to see once she can control the Sharingan on her own, she’s not sure if she believes them.

As he ruffles her hair, Uncle Madara answers, “I’ll see you in a few years, kid,” which she thinks means no.

Itachi says she lost her eyesight because she tried to combat the Mangekyo Sharingan with hers, that had only just activated for the first time. He also says she’d be better off in Konoha, but now it’s five days later, and she’s holding his hand in the middle of the forest, if the sounds of the birds and the running stream are anything to by, and she wouldn’t change her decision for anything in the world.

“Watch out for her, Itachi,” Uncle Madara says, and her brother’s fingers tighten around hers. Somewhere above them, a new bird join in the song, and it’s one she’s never heard in Konoha. “Remember what I said.”

Though she doesn’t hear him go, she can feel he’s gone before Itachi even says goodbye. “What was he talking about?”

At seven, there are a lot questions people don’t like to answer for her. “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” her brother says, and runs his fingers through her hair. They catch on knots and tangles, pulling, and Sasuke feels more like straw than ever before.

 

 

Supposedly, the Akatsuki is filled with nine very scary, very dangerous missing-nin, and her brother’s joining to keep them away from Konoha, which she’s not allowed to tell anyone. Regardless of his reasoning, or what everyone’s supposed to be, it doesn’t take Sasuke long to decide that collectively, the Akatsuki is about as frightening as a box of angry kittens.

On the first day, there’s a meeting about Itachi’s initiation, and an argument breaks out over Sasuke. It lasts ten minutes before the first woman she’s heard clears her throat, and everyone falls silent; Sasuke feels a sudden quiver through the air, barely there but still tangible, and she realizes it’s fear. Whoever this woman is, she isn’t the leader, but she’s powerful enough to make men afraid of her. Sasuke likes her instantly.

“Uchiha Itachi will become a full member,” the woman says, and then her hand is on Sasuke’s shoulder. “Should anyone lay a finger on this girl, it’s my wrath you’ll deal with. Do we have an understanding, men?”

An agreement is reached, and like that, she changes from little Sasuke, Uchiha Fugaku’s failure of a daughter, to Sasuke-chan, the Akatsuki’s honorary younger sister.


	2. renaissance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one melts hearts quite like little girls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aka, the Akatsuki adopts Sasuke.

Though Sasuke can’t keep the Sharingan active for days on end like Itachi can, it’s not long before she use hers for an extended amount of time, allowing her snatches in which she can see. It’s a big and beautiful world, Uncle Madara said, and she quickly learns to love it.

Today Sasuke is eight, and it corresponds with a time Itachi has no mission. When he’s gone, she stays in Amegakure, often with Konan, who sometimes trains her, but Akatsuki members are allowed to go where they please as long as they discard their forehead protectors and cloaks on days they have no jobs. Itachi brings her into the River Country, and it’s warm and sunny, air thick with the smell of honeysuckle and civilian innocence. There’s nothing special about the day, but they see no shinobi either, and he lets her be reckless.

When she activates the Sharingan, recently matured, her vision is clear enough to see the leaves on nearby trees in perfect definition. “I bought you a present, Sasuke,” he says, and hands her a pinwheel like the one from the festival in Konoha less than a year before.

She smiles as she accepts, and holds out her hand. “I found these,” she says. A breeze sweeps by, twirling the paper, and unsettling the already uneasy river. “We missed your birthday.”

This is the first time he’s ever had a mission on his birthday. Though he accepts the honeysuckle, he removes one from the small bundle, and tucks it behind her ear. For a moment, he’s silent, so she is too, because he needs these, and instead she blows on the pinwheel, making it spin again. He watches the movement, useless and childlike, and she’s starting to realize that despite what she always thought, fourteen isn’t terribly old. If not a child in the way she is, he’s not much better.

“I’m sorry, Sasuke,” he says, “that I brought you with me.”

When she shrugs, her indifference is genuine. “I want to be with you,” she says, and thinks of Sakura, and the bright pink of her hair. “I don’t care where.” She feels her mouth twitch, nearly down into a frown, and stops it, knowing it’ll make it worse if he thinks she’s sad. “Don’t you want me, nii-san?”

With her parents, she always felt like a burden. Here she might still be far below him in every aspect, but no one looks at her and expects her to be her brother in female form. She hasn’t talked to anyone her own age in almost a year, true. It doesn’t matter. At eight, she can navigate a forest sightless. She can aim a kunai by feeling a person’s chakra. Her Sharingan is nearing deadly. There’s no one to see her as someone made of twigs and straw. The company might not always be the best, and sometimes she’s lonely, but whenever she feels that way, she just reminds herself that she could be completely alone, no Itachi to return to her.

That’s a reality she can’t imagine living.

“Of course,” he says, and sounds almost afraid. “You’re my little sister. There’s nowhere I’d like you better than at my side.”

She thinks he’s only saying that because it’s her birthday. On normal days, he’d say all her wants for her is to be safe, and he doesn’t consider this safe. “I love you,” she says, and takes his hand. The river roars in response to the strength of the wind, blocking out the sound of the spinning pinwheel, and her Sharingan lets her watch its waves.

As a member of the Uchiha clan, her life is meant to be tied to smoke and flame, licking at her fingers and filling her lungs. Ame is drowning in rain, though, and she thinks her life might be tied to water instead.

Itachi taps her forehead with two fingers, gentle rather than hard. “I love you, too, Sasuke,” he says, and like Shisui, his smile is both happy and sad.

 

 

Konan is lovely in her seriousness, and for the first time, makes Sasuke proud to be a kunoichi instead of a shinobi. “If you want to get technical,” Konan tells her on one of the days where Itachi is gone, and Sasuke is in no mood to watch the world around her, “kunoichi is just the word for a female shinobi, but differences remain. When people look at us, they see us in a way they don’t see men. They’re the fighters, the hard power of the world. At some point, we become the delicate ones, trustworthy in truth, if not in strength. This is why we’re dangerous.”

When Sasuke was younger, she was often mistaken for her parents’ youngest son rather than only daughter, despite her long hair. It was too wild, hiding the sharp features of her face, and dodging the dinner table to avoid the ever present disappointment of her father left her thinner than she should have been. She doesn’t know what people see now. Konan keeps Sasuke’s hair back with a paper freesia more days than not, and her clothes are her own now, not her brother’s. Maybe people finally see her as just Sasuke.

“If we’re so dangerous,” she says, lifting her eyebrow, “then why do we have to take lessons in the language of _fans_.”

“It’s used more often than you’d think among wealthy civilians,” Konan answers. Sasuke turns her head in the woman’s direction, though there’s nothing but darkness, and in the background is the ever present _pit-pat_ of rainfall against the window. The futon she lies on is ten years old, and painful on her back. “Remember, Sasuke-chan, we’re kunoichi before we’re shinobi, and we’re shinobi before we’re women. Don’t listen to Deidara or Sasori; war and destruction aren’t art. What you learn in those lessons is.”

Sasuke doesn’t understand art. What she understands is the sound of a kunai or shuriken sailing through the air, and thunk of the weapon connecting with its target. She understands that in her sleep, her brother is a murderer and her torturer, but in the waking world, he’s someone kind stuck in a life more suitable to her than him. In the end, she understands that what she understands is something he doesn’t want her to, and he’d much rather she agree with Konan.

This is art to her, in the form her limited imagination lets her come up with: love is a moving art, because it’s eternally creating, and people are wrong when they act like it needs to be romantic. One day, though, she’s going to have a body that identifies her as a woman undeniably, and no manner of supposed delicacy will stop her from being better at deconstruction than creation.

Turning her head back to the ceiling, she asks, “When I can keep my Sharingan active for more than a couple of hours in a day, can you teach me your Shikigami no Mai, Konan-san?”

There’s a short silence. “We’ll see when you’re older,” Konan says, and stands.

At eight, Sasuke truly hates her age. She shuts her eyes, which is pointless but habit, and focuses on the sound of rain as Konan leaves.

 

 

Of the ten members of the Akatsuki, there are three Sasuke can’t stand: Hidan, Kakuzu, and Orochimaru.

At least Hidan and Kakuzu, she decides, are intelligent enough to leave her alone. The first time Orochimaru touches her shoulder in a way that makes her uncomfortable and says what beautiful eyes she has, she tries to stab him. “I’m young, but I’m not stupid,” she says, activating her Sharingan. They’re in Ame, in an random street half a mile away from headquarters, and Itachi is near Iwa, long gone for another two weeks. “Try to come after them again, and I don’t know who will, but _someone_ will kill you.”

It’s no secret the Sharingan’s something people find desirable, and she knows that statement wasn’t meant as some creepy want for her. Other men have called out for her when she walks through the streets, and she’s learned to ignore them, but she also knows the signs. This was something else entirely.

Maybe she should feel bad about using others as her defense, but Orochimaru isn’t S-class without reason, and she’s only eight. No amount of training from random Akatsuki members can change that. Both Itachi and Konan say there’s no shame in needing protection. Because of her family, she spent years rejecting it. In Ame, she’s learned to understand why it’s necessary.

Orochimaru isn’t getting her eyes. He must understand that her threat is real, because he leaves without saying a word.

 

 

Itachi first shows signs of illness not long before Sasuke turns nine. Of course, he downplays it. Kisame is blunt, and she can appreciate that.

“Train hard,” he tells her on her birthday when somehow, he managed to come along for a short trip into the Wind Country. The weather is cool, the sun going down and the desert taking a break from the heat, and a cactus wren chirps not far away. “You might end up being the one protecting him.”

According to everyone, Kisame is filled with rage and hostility all the time, constantly ready for a fight, and Sasuke privately wonders if she reminds him of someone. That, or he just likes kids. “Is it just an understanding that I’ll join when I’m older?” she says, and Itachi returns. Today she doesn’t have her Sharingan activated, too close to Suna for that, but she enjoys the desert all the same.

He coughs despite what’s probably a great effort not too, and the sound settles somewhere in the back of his throat. Like a good little sister, she doesn’t bring it up yet. “Not for a long time, Sasuke,” he says in a patient voice that means never.

With a short laugh, Kisame says, “We need to kick someone out to fit you. All in favor for fucking—”

“There’s a child present, Kisame.”

“Shut up, Itachi. Anyway, I wouldn’t mind killing that freak Kakuzu to get Sasuke-chan a position.”

Kakuzu has a tendency to make casual comments about taking people’s hearts for his own, and has already killed several of his partners for theirs. For obvious reasons, Itachi keeps her as far away from him as he can. “Don’t you need to kill him five times?” she says.

“Just watch me,” Kisame says. “I’ll take care of him in one go. Want to help?”

Even though she can’t see him, she can feel Itachi’s exasperation. “Stop swearing in front of my sister,” he says. “Then I’ll consider it.”

The bird chirps again, closer than before. Ever since she lost her sight, her other senses have improved, and she wonders if the wren’s close enough for the other two to hear.

 

 

At nine, Sasuke makes her first kill. It’s an accident, genuinely; she’s taking a shortcut back to the hotel she and Itachi are staying in during a visit to a small town not far outside Takigakure, and the men corner her in an alley. As young as she is, she’s not naive, and she understands.

Like her brother would want, she tries to fight them off without harming them too badly, but she’s small, and there are too many, and suddenly she’s up against an alley wall. Later, she’ll say it was instinct.

By the time Itachi comes, she’s shaking on the ground, surrounded by three corpses with slit throats, and bloody footprints running somewhere far away. He takes one look at her, one look at them, and is gone. No one screams. That’s a good thing, because she thinks she might have screamed then, too.

There’s nothing to say, so he reaches down, throwing her over his back, and carries her somewhere far away.

 

 

Since space is limited, she shares a room with her brother when he’s around. His hair smells like her shampoo, something cheap twinged with rain, and for the first time in years, she falls asleep tucked under his chin.

Nine’s a special number, right at the edge of double digits, the age he said she might graduate once. When she thinks back to her life in Konoha, it feels grey, something colorless and bland, though her home was brighter than Ame could ever hope to be. “Do you ever miss it, nii-san?” she asks, and doesn’t need to clarify.

His fingers run through her hair, soft and no longer stiff like straw. More often than not, she doesn’t feel like a doll anymore. “Yes,” he says. The room’s dark, she imagines. He would never be that blunt in the light. “Do you?”

After a moment of deliberation, she says, “I miss some things.”

Unlike him, she wasn’t old enough to view Konoha as something whole. She didn’t work for the village yet, so her home fell into parts. As terrible as it is, she doesn’t miss her parents as often as she should, but she misses Shisui, and Sakura. She misses her old bed, the tomatoes from the market. Sometimes she ever misses the sweetpeas, which she hasn’t found anywhere else, that she used to put by her cousin’s grave.

When he doesn’t answer her, her eyes gradually grow heavy, and the stress of the past week takes it hold. As she falls asleep, she thinks she hears him say, “You’ll return soon enough,” and tells herself it’s part of a dream.

 

 

In Amegakure, the Academy is much less official than Konoha, but a test is still needed to advance. Even kunoichi are at less risk than normal civilian girls, Kisame says after news of the incident near Taki travels, so it’s in Sasuke’s best interest to become a genin. It’s Deidara who brings her, hanging around headquarters for once, and he threatens to explode the chuunin instructor who argues against testing her on the grounds that she can’t see.

She passes blind under the simple name of “Sasuke,” and the chuunin hands her the forehead protector directly instead of expecting her to walk over. “Is it true?” another graduate asks, and her voice is reedy and high like a thunderstorm. “Were you really trained by Lady Angel?”

“I heard you’re a refugee from another village,” a second says, a boy. “What’s it like to live somewhere that it doesn’t rain all the time?”

In Konoha, it really only rains in spring. In all the time she’s been in the Wind Country, it’s never been anything other than sunny and dry. “I was trained by a lot of people,” Sasuke says. “And you’re genin. You’ll find out eventually.”

Though several people offer to help her, she doesn’t need her eyes to get her home, and navigates sightless through the flooded streets. Like any shinobi in Ame, she learned how to walk on water early on, and she can feel the ripples below her feet. The route home is created through sound and smell, and to a certain degree, the feel of people’s chakra around her. Some people have called her brother a demon for his eyes; Konan is an angel, Pein a god. But Sasuke can wander a crowd sightless without brushing against anyone or anything, and that makes her something closer to a ghost.

 

 

Sasuke needs her sight for origami. Though Konan won’t teach her how to infuse it with chakra yet, she’s willing to teach her how to fold paper, as long as Sasuke has the Sharingan activated.

With it, Sasuke is a quick learner. Itachi’s already taught her how to consciously copy enemy jutsu rather than subconsciously, and recording the pattern of folded paper isn’t difficult. Konan teaches her how to make flowers, at first, and eventually cranes for luck. When Sasuke makes a doll, it’s something she figured out on her own.

“My cousin used to say I looked like a straw one,” she explains when Konan lifts her eyebrow in question. “Paper with close enough.”

“You’re not plain enough to be made of straw,” Konan says, and Sasuke still doesn’t understand how someone like her ended up in the Akatsuki. “You’re closer to a silk-skinned ningyo—no, Sasuke-chan, like this.”

Konan shows her how to fold the corners up to the center crease, the middle step to make a hibiscus flower. By now, a few hours have passed, and Sasuke’s growing tired from using her Sharingan for so long. “Konan-san,” she says, “I know I’m not good enough join, but will I ever be good enough to help?”

Her affiliation with them means she isn’t allowed on a genin team, though she wouldn’t want to be anyway. “This is Amegakure,” Konan says. “Here there’s a use for everyone.”

 

 

There’s a single truth about little girls that most people don’t realize: no one notices them. As a child, Sasuke’s not allowed to be part of the Akatsuki, and she doesn’t have the skill for it anyway (it’s doubtful she ever will, really), but she’s a gennin now. Pein is the leader of the Amegakure as much as he is the Akatsuki, and all it takes is a few well placed suggestions from various members for Sasuke to become a new observer. Itachi isn’t necessarily happy about it, she knows, but at the same time, it’s better to walk around with a destination than to wander. The incident near Taki scared him as much as it did her, and even though she’s out more, a real job is an added security.

On occasion, she’s even allowed to go with him now, because little girls can find things out that even a Mangekyo Sharingan can’t.

They’re in the Lightning Country, them and Kisame, and the mission is to gather information on someone named “Killer Bee.” Of course, Kisame and Itachi are going to enter Kumogakure, but there’s always information to be found outside the walls, too. It’s in a small village a couple miles away that she hears someone say, “The reward for who finds the Uchiha girl finally got pulled.”

She pauses, ducks into a doorway, and activates her Sharingan under the cover of her sunglasses. It’s June, a few days after her brother’s sixteenth birthday, and sunny enough that the eyewear isn’t suspicious. The speaker was a shinobi with a Kumo forehead protector speaking to what looks like his team, two men and a woman.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” the second man says with a shrug. “That reward started what, two years ago? Little girls don’t last that long with crazy older brother kidnappers.”

If Konoha suspected Sasuke of being kidnapped, shouldn’t they expect the same of Itachi? Without witnesses, there shouldn’t be any proof he did anything at all. “I still say it’s a shame,” the woman says. “They want her so bad because of that kekkei genkai, right? Last one in the world to have it is a guy who murdered his whole family.”

For shinobi, this is average gossip. For Sasuke, it’s an uncomfortable realization that at one point, people commonly forgot her name, but she’s a victim now. Victims have identities. So do villains, and Konoha wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they saw her as she is. Even now, it’s Itachi who deserves acknowledgment. Maybe her parents would be proud of her newfound skill, if they could see her, but between her and her brother, she’s the one who’s falling.

“Ten thousand ryo,” the second man says a sign. “What a waste.”

When she’s older, maybe that number will be associated with her name again, but as a bounty instead of a reward. For now, though, she’ll be content with anonymity, and continue on her way.

 

 

Today Sasuke turns ten. She goes to Konan, face red, and says, “Help.”

She tried to go to Itachi first, but Itachi said it was a woman problem, so here she is. “But you’re so _young_ ,” Konan says, a rare surprise leaking into her voice, and Sasuke hadn’t thought she could be more embarrassed.

Quickly, she discovers there’s no limit, because she receives what Konan calls “The Talk,” and refuses to speak to anyone else for the rest of the day.

 

 

Itachi’s health seems to deteriorate all at once, and then Orochimaru’s suddenly out of the Akatsuki. “Watch yourself, Sasuke,” her brother says, and she saw the other man so rarely that she wouldn’t have noticed he was gone if she wasn’t told. “He wants the Sharingan. I ran him off for now, but that doesn’t mean he won’t come back.”

If it were anyone other than Itachi in this situation, Orochimaru would be dead. By now, Sasuke’s no stranger to killing, and when she thinks about that day in the street, she wishes her brother had killed him anyway. “Are you all right?” she says, looking up at him. The Sharingan bathes everything in a soft red glow, brightening colors and light, and she doesn’t remember what the world looks like through normal eyes.

Though she’s too old for it now, she doesn’t protest when Itachi picks her up, putting her over his back. They’re heading back to Amegakure from the Fire Country, the closest she’s been to Konoha in years. “Don’t worry about me, Sasuke,” he says as she rests her chin on his shoulder. “Everyone gets worse before they get better. Want to stop for dinner in the next town?”

“Can we get shrimp shumai? And miso soup?”

“Anything you want,” he answers, and she squeezes him tight.

 

 

In Ame, Sasuke only activates her Sharingan when she absolutely has to, having memorized the streets, and feels no need to see. She’s on the outskirts, near the lake, returning to headquarters with news of a plot against Pein, and the attacker’s chakra is too well cloaked for her to notice him until his teeth are sinking into her neck.

When she wakes, she’s feverish and soaking wet, lying on a cement floor, and for the first time in years, it’s Uncle Madara’s voice that says, “You need to be more careful, Sasuke.”

She tries to activate the Sharingan, wanting to see him, but there’s a burning sensation in her shoulder so painful she nearly screams. That’s when she notices she’s shirtless, and there’s the feeling of drying ink on her skin. “What’s going on?” she says, and everything hurts. “What happened?”

It was Orochimaru, Uncle Madara explained, and he marked her with something called a cursed seal to use her body as his new one when his current one decays, because he couldn’t get her brother. “You’re lucky you survived,” Uncle Madara says, and grabs her arm, pulling her into sitting position. “There’s a way to get rid of it completely, but you’re so young it’s more likely to kill you. But I can still confine it.”

Sasuke’s never felt so violated in her life.

“Where’s Itachi?” she asks.

“Somewhere near Suna,” he answers. “This will be painful.”

Then his hand his the place that hurts on her shoulder. The pain is the worst she’s felt since Tsukuyomi, and she thinks she might have screamed.

 

 

After he returns, Itachi brings her somewhere without telling her the destination, but she can hear tree sparrows singing in the branches above them, and knows it’s the Fire Country anyway. “I need you to be brave for me, Sasuke,” he says. “Can you do that?”

Frowning, she says, “What’s wrong, nii-san?” because it’s been a long time since he’s talked to her like she’s a child.

Fabric rustles, and grass crunches, the sound of him sitting. “Do you remember what I told you about the Mangekyo Sharingan?” he says. “What it takes to get one?”

Despite the autumn warmth, there’s a feeling of something cold slipping through her body. She doesn’t need him to say it for her to understand. “No,” she says, activating the Sharingan, and he looks far too calm for what he’s asking her to do. “I’m not going to.”

“There’s no cure,” he tells her. “I’ll be dead within the month. I want you to have it.”

“No, you’re my _brother_ , I’m not going to kill you,” she says, something startlingly close to fear coiling tight inside her. “We can go find the legendary sannin, the medic, she’ll be able to—”

He grabs her wrist, slipping a kunai into hand before she can stop him. “Sasuke,” he says, “do as you’re told.”

“I can’t—don’t make me, you said there’s nowhere you’d rather be than with—”

When he taps her forehead, she cuts herself off, and doesn’t feel ashamed that she’s crying. “I’m dying, and there’s no cure,” he says. “You need to live. Go back to Konoha. Show the Hokage the mark on your shoulder. They’ll keep you safe.”

“But—”

“Do you love me?” She nods, not sure what else to do. “Then do this, for me. Okay, Sasuke? Keep going, and stay safe.”

She protests, tries to fight against him, but eventually he just pulls her closer, the tip of the kunai pressed to his chest. They’ve been here too long, and she knows it. “I love you, Itachi,” she says, and slides the blade between his ribs.

 

 

Somehow, it’s Uncle Madara who finds her again, not Kisame like Sasuke imagined.  “Your brother asked me for a favor, in the event of his death,” Uncle Madara says. “You’re not going to like it, but it’ll make you stronger.”

Right now, Sasuke doesn’t care about getting stronger. All she cares about is getting home, and she doesn’t know where that is. Home for her was Itachi, and she just put a kunai into his heart.

“I want to bury him,” she says. With the Mangekyo Sharingan, her vision is even clearer than before, but still all she can see is her brother, and his blood on her hands. “Can you help me, Ojisan?”

Like with Orochimaru, she doesn’t notice the attack until it’s too late. “Sorry, kid,” Uncle Madara answers, and something hard comes down against the back of her head.

 

 

When Sasuke wakes, she’s alone, and there are bandages over her eyes. She’s confused, with nothing making much sense, but there’s a single thought running through her head:

Itachi is dead. Return to Konoha.

As she leaves, she stumbles around, holding out her arms to feel for walls or furniture, and doesn’t wait around long enough to search for her shoes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's sort of jumpy and quick, but I didn't want to make it too long. There'll be more about what happened in the next chapter, though she'll be back in Konoha, as I'm sure you figured out from the last part.


	3. reconstruction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Mangekyo Sharingan can do strange things to a person's memory, and Itachi always did have a habit of making decisions for his little sister.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter with all the OCs, because she needed a team.

They find her in the woods, disoriented, barefoot, and blind. A woman says, “Is that?” and a man answers, “Oh, shit, I think it is,” before a third person inches towards her.

“I’m Uchiha Sasuke,” she says, trying to sound more brave than she feels, because there’s something wrong with her. It’s like someone reached into her head, and twisted a pin inside a part of her mind that now won’t stop hurting. Considering how hard of a time she’s having recalling details of anything leading up to waking sightless in an unknown room, she’s assuming it has something to do with her memory. “Itachi is dead. I just want to go home.”

When fingers find her forehead protector, she flinches, and somewhere above her, two squirrels chatter. A second woman sighs quietly, one single exhale of disbelief. “All right,” the one closest to her, the one that recognized her, says. “We’re going to take you back to Konoha.”

The first one says, “Kakashi,”  as a warning, and the name stirs up something uncomfortable, but Sasuke can’t grasp the reason. Something’s wrong, so incredibly wrong.

“No,” the second woman says, next to her now, “he’s right. I had her for a few classes in the Academy before I became a jounin. Take her to Yamanaka to be sure, but no one else has hair like this.”

Sasuke looks up in the direction of the voice, and the bandages are rough on her face. “You aren’t Etsuko-sensei.”

But Etsuko-sensei wasn’t her only sensei, she thinks. “I’m Kurenai, who taught the lectures on genjutsu,” the woman says, and Sasuke vaguely remembers her. “Sasuke, what’s wrong with your eyes?”

“I don’t know,” she answers, and her heartbeat stutters at the realization she’s telling the truth, “but I don’t think you’re supposed to take them off.” Then something comes back to her from the fight, and the stutter leaps up to her throat, stronger than a cough. “I need to see the Hokage.”

There’s a short beat of silence. She wraps her arm around her stomach, and for the first time since she started walking, feels the dried blood on her hand. “Okay,” Kakashi says, and from the shifting of fabric, and crunch of grass, she thinks he just kneeled down in front of her.  “Sasuke, we’re going to take you back, but you need to answer a couple of questions for me first. Can you do that for me?”

Though she doesn’t know why he’s talking to her like she’s a kid, she nods, willing to do anything to get out of here. Kakashi continues, “Why do you need to see the Hokage?”

“Itachi said he would help,” she says. “There was a man, and he bit me, and it hurt, and I couldn’t use my chakra properly. I know it sounds weird, but—”

Someone grabs the back of her shirt, and pulls. “Well, fuck,” the first woman says. “We’re getting her back. Now. I don’t think she’s lying. This is Orochimaru’s handiwork.”

The first man makes a weird strangled noise; Kurenai’s chakra flares. Even though something tells Sasuke she should know that name, she doesn’t, and maybe whatever the first woman looked at is what’s screwing with her memory.

“Last question,” Kakashi says. “Your cousin used to call you something. What was it?”

Even with her memory as patchy as it is right now, she’s sure she’s never met someone named “Kakashi” before. That might be a common name, though, or maybe he worked with her brother, she thinks, so she answers, “Straw doll,” and hopes he meant Shisui.

When there’s a second shift in fabric, she knows she got it right. “Come on,” he says, and takes her hand, warm around hers. “Let’s get you home.”

 

 

It takes three meetings with the Hokage, a Yamanaka invasion of the mind, and two weeks observation in I&T despite her age before Sasuke is declared real and safe. By the end of it, she’s certain that the loss of memory is Itachi’s fault, that he knew this was bound to happen, and she went through something the Konoha-nin were better off not seeing. For her own safety, she decides not to mention it.

Even after she’s given back her status as a Uchiha of Konoha, though, there are still three problems that remain:

She came in with an Amegakure forehead protector.

She has a confined cursed seal.

She has nowhere to live.

At least the first two have explanations. Where better to bring a blind, kidnapped little girl than a corrupt country Konoha rarely deals with outside of wartime? When Itachi registered her for the gennin exam, he just used her given name, so they never heard anything about her. He confined the seal, too. That’s when he had her kill him. The first time the interrogator, whose face she never saw because the bandages can’t come off until after her last day in confinement, tried to say something bad about him, she refused to say a word for the rest of the day. After that, she just learned to ignore it.

Now she’s out, and important people are deciding living arrangements while she sits on a hospital bed with a friendly medical-nin named Michi and the Kakashi guy across from her.  “If it hurts, or feels off,” Michi says, “don’t hesitate to tell me.”

Cold metal presses against Sasuke’s cheek bones, the start of the bandages. She remembers being bandaged before, after going blind from Itachi’s Mangekyo Sharingan, and seeing nothing once they were off. Suddenly afraid, she shuts her eyes, and feels the bandages fall away with a too-loud click of the scissors.

“The lights are dimmed, Sasuke-chan,” Michi says. “It shouldn’t hurt you.”

Probably slower than is necessary, Sasuke opens her eyes, and the moment she realizes what’s going on, she does so all at once. “Nothing’s red,” she says. “I can see. Why can I see?”

Everything’s less vibrant than it would be with her Sharingan activated, but she also doesn’t feel her chakra getting drained out of her just for a few hours of her sight. To her right, there’s a rustle and light clang, and then someone’s in her line of vision. His hair’s grey, messy  like Shisui’s before his mother made him get a haircut, with a forehead protector pulled over one slate grey eye, and a mask on his face. He’s holding something rectangular and white up to her face, which she recognizes as the back of a photo.

When the woman appears at his shoulder, Sasuke can see her just as clearly—white coat, eyes like moss, hair the color of bark. “Oh,” Michi says, and her face pales. Sasuke’s happiness abruptly ends. “This is like you, isn’t it?”

Before Sasuke can ask, Kakashi looks away from the photo and back to her. “Sasuke,” he says, “what’s the color of your eyes?”

She almost says red and black, but stops herself, because she doubts he means the Sharingan. Though she hasn’t seen what she looks like in a long time, something like an eye color is a hard thing to forget. “Grey,” she says, “but a lot people think it’s black.” The other two exchange a look. “Is there something wrong?”

“I’m going to go get the Sandaime,” Michi says, which means something is most certainly wrong, before turning to Sasuke. “You’re going to be fine. Kakashi-san, I’m sorry, but?”

After he says he’ll take it from here, Michi leave. For a moment, things are awkward. But Sasuke is smart, and realistically, two and a half years isn’t a terribly long time. “They’re blue, aren’t they?” she says. “Dark blue.”

By some cruel twist of fate, she was born with her father’s eyes; her brother managed  to get their grandfather’s, who was nice enough, from what Sasuke can remember. When she thinks of him, she remembers chocolate mochi sneaked when her mother wasn’t looking, and hands shaking. Eventually, there was coughing and blood. Itachi’s illness wasn’t random.

She doesn’t want those eyes.

Despite what she wants or doesn’t want, Kakashi’s shoulder drops. In the dim light of the hospital room, his visible eye seems flat. “I’m sorry,” he says, which is somehow better and worse than hearing yes.

Because of how often Itachi used his Mangekyo Sharingan, his eyesight had been going, too, though at a slow rate. But she knows what an Eternal Mangekyo is. The moment this happened, any damage overuse had caused corrected itself. Kekkei genkai never have much logic anyway.

The doors opens, loud and threatening, and the Hokage enters with Michi a few steps behind. Sasuke had been so desperate to return because Itachi told her she had to, but suddenly she thinks of rain and paper daffodils, and wishes she were anywhere but here.

 

 

Whether or not she’s “safe,” Sasuke’s still suffering the effects of “captive bonding” and came with the title of gennin from a different village, so living situations are tricky. In the end, they stick her in a modestly sized apartment in an a calm area of Konoha’s residential neighborhood, with either Kakashi, as the other last Sharingan user (who happens not the be a Uchiha, uncomfortably enough), or various other jounin and ANBU periodically checking up on her. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best anyone can think of.

Considering that it means she can have at least some time to herself, she’s not complaining.

On the first night, Kurenai stops by, looking about as confused as Sasuke expected when she walked inside. “Etsuko is going to come around eventually to see you,” Kurenai says, taking in the sight of the origami paper scattered throughout the sparsely furnished living area. Sasuke’s still getting used to the fact that she can see, and may have gone overboard with the colors. “I didn’t know you could do origami.”

“I could only see for a few hours a day for a while, and lived in a place where it always rained,” Sasuke says, rubbing her eye in exhaustion. Activating the Sharingan at random is still a habit she needs to break. “You’d need a hobby after a while, too.”

Even though she has a feeling it’s more than that, it’s the best reasoning she can think of, and she remembers fingers tucking paper flowers into the elastic holding back her ponytail. Kurenai actually smiles that, small and maybe a little affectionate, moving around easily in the apartment despite the low lighting. “I never had the talent,” she says, examining a raven. “Of course you’d be a bird person. Have you eaten yet?”

She hasn’t. Still, Sasuke nods. “I thought these were just supposed to be check ups.”

Shrugging, Kurenai says, “I have a soft spot for lonely gennin.”

“I’m not a gennin, though,” Sasuke says, frowning. “No one’s going to let me be a Konoha-nin when I showed up like _that_.”

 _That_ referring to the Ame-nin forehead protector, of course, and the supposed captive bonding, which isn’t true, but she’s ten, and no one listens to girls who are ten, even when they’re right. Apparently Kurenai has much more faith in Konoha than Sasuke does, though, because she says, “Eh, give it a couple of months. I’m sure a few strings can be pulled. Did you go looking for clothes today, or just groceries and paper?”

To Sasuke, the paper was incredibly important, and she forgot about clothes once she saw it. She hadn’t realized she was still in the outfit the hospital handed her. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow I’m going to be busy on a mission,” Kurenai tells her, “but how about I send over someone to help you? When’s the last time you’ve stepped foot into a store?”

“Um.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” She doesn’t need help, Sasuke wants to insist, but she knows she’s a bit of a novelty right now. After all, she did return from the dead. “I’m going to make you dinner. Consider it a welcome home present.”

Everyone keeps calling Konoha home, but it still doesn’t feel that way. “Okay,” she says anyway, and adds, “Thank you,” because missing-nin can teach their little sisters manners.

Someone other than Itachi had to have taught her origami, though, and she can’t help but wonder if that someone misses her.

 

 

For some reason, it was Kakashi who got stuck helping her with clothes shopping, and things just derailed from there.

Now it’s a week later, which corresponds with a dry spot of missions for him, and he caught her trying to go to the compound to train. Apparently she’s not allowed there, though, and after a ridiculous amount of begging and pleading, he brought her out to an empty training ground on the other side of town. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he says, more to himself than to her, but she’s too excited to care. “Okay, remember. It’s been a month since you’ve done anything, and these are new eyes. Go easy on yourself.”

In the past seven days, he’s called her both hyperactive and sullen, said she was brat, and that she needs to pick an attitude and stick with it. Maybe if she proves herself to him, she can become a Konoha gennin. If she becomes a Konoha gennin, she’s one step closer to finding out who’s in Ame, and if she really has someone waiting for her. Or, at the very least, she can get the constant stream of jounin and ANBU off her back, because it’s starting to get annoying. Kakashi’s the only one who doesn’t treat her like she’s about to shatter into a million shards of fragile wood. Blind girls don’t become kunoichi if they’re delicate, and losing Itachi hurts somewhere deep inside her that she didn’t know existed, but she can survive this. She has to, for him.

Even more than returning to Ame, or gaining some form of independence, though, she needs to become a gennin again so they can let her train, grow stronger. Despite the block in her mind keeping her memories in some dark, dusty corner of her subconscious, she knows this much: it’s Orochimaru’s fault her brother’s dead. If it weren’t for this seal, Itachi wouldn’t have made her slip the blade through his chest. Her brother might not have liked killing, but she entered Konoha with his blood on her hands; she doesn’t care how dirty she needs to get them again if it means getting her revenge.

Kakashi doesn’t help her, but he watches, and comments. “Your chakra control is good,” he says. “You need to work on your physical stamina. A month off didn’t do wonders for you. Aim’s not bad—”

“My aim’s _great_ ,” she cuts in, a little insulted, and tries to hide that she’s out of breath. “I’m just not used to targeting something without a chakra signature.”

He doesn’t have an answer to that. She hadn’t expected him to. While she might not be delicate, she’s skinny with messy hair, tall for her age, and ten. No one is ever going to take someone like her seriously. “Right,” he says in a blank voice hard to gauge, and she’s reminded strongly, painfully of Itachi. “It seems as though you have control over your Sharingan in its normal form. Have you tested out the Mangekyo?”

With an Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan, she won’t go blind, but these aren’t her eyes, and it makes her wary. But he’s right, and she should try, so she activates it.  The world becomes beautiful and great, colorful with detailed movement, and if only this gift came at a different price.

She doesn’t realize she’s fainting until she wakes up ten minutes later, leaning back against a stump with Kakashi shoving a bottle of water in her face. “You don’t have the chakra for it,” he says. “Give it a few years.”

Despite not wanting it, there’s something about that that’s painful and wrong, but still, she drinks her water, and doesn’t say a thing.

 

 

On the day she’s finally considered safe enough to become a Konoha gennin, she dreams of a black sky with red clouds, filled with paper birds. It leaves her tired, and sad, and she attends team assignments wishing it would rain.

She’s little, and sits in the back, so no one notices her until her name’s announced. “Team Ten,” the chuunin instructor says, “is Wakamori Kichiro, Oshiro Yuki, and Uchiha Sasuke.”

There’s a ripple of confusion through the crowd, and wandering, curious eyes finds her. Outside it’s bright and warm, a typical late June day, and sunlight slips through the windows, reflecting off every forehead protector’s metal band. That’s when the thought hits her, hard, for the first time in weeks:

_I don’t belong here._

To her relief, no one calls across the room to comment. In preparation for jounin sensei to come in to collect their students, everyone begins splitting off into their teams, and hers comes to her instead of expect her to find them. “I’m Kichiro,” a redhead boy says, taking a seat in the row in front of her, and twisting. “This is Yuki.”

Oshiro Yuki is like her, all dark hair and dark eyes and sharp features, tall for his age. But his skin is darker, there’s a splash of acne across his nose. There’s no symbol on his back, which means he’s a civilian’s son. The same can’t be said for Kichiro, with the tilted five-point blue star that she vaguely recognizes as a symbol worn by a boy one of her cousins tried date. His hair’s short, bunched up by his forehead protector, and there’s a cut above his eyebrow. He’s barely taller than she is.

“I’m Sasuke,” she says, and several people are still trying to discreetly shoot her looks. Of all the teams, there’s only one in its entirety that isn’t; a boy in green and orange, a girl with her hair pulled into two buns like a second set of ears, and a Hyuuga. This is the age group right above hers, she realizes.

“You’re younger than us, right?” Yuki says, and reluctantly, Sasuke nods. “That’s probably why you were put with me. I’m the youngest of the year. Don’t worry, we’ll look out for you.”

Just because she’s young doesn’t mean she needs any looking after. Before she can say this, though, the door slides open with a click, and the first few jounin come in, wearing varying degrees of smiles. She wonders how many people in this room will return to their families tonight, having to explain that they failed.

A man she doesn’t recognize calls for Team Ten. He’s on the younger end, with brown curls, and a scar across his neck. “Ready, Sasuke-chan?” Kichiro asks, and she wonders how’d they treat her if she were a boy.

As she stands, she ties her forehead protector around her head, careful not to knot her hair. If she’s going to become a kunoichi of Konoha again, she might as well do it right.

 

 

“Heard you passed, kid.”

“Heard you failed your team again, Kakashi-san.”

When she arrives home, he’s leaning against her door frame, reading his stupid book. She’s sweaty, and her body aches, and though she knows it wasn’t the purpose of the exercise, she’s still angry with herself for not getting the bells. “How’d you know the answer was teamwork?” he asks, and looks past the edge of the cover, down at her.

She opens the door, slips inside the cool darkness of her apartment, and flips on the light. “What’s the point without it?” she says, pulling off her forehead protector. “No one’s invincible. Teammates help you from dying. They can also pick up the mission and complete it when you finally do.”

For a long time, she had to live blind, stumbling around in the dark learning how to navigate by sense, and scent, and sound. Before she did, Itachi took her by the hand and acted as her guide. Now he’s dead, by her kunai, and he’s her eyes again. She spent years thinking he was the greatest shinobi alive, but she was wrong, and every time she looks at her forehead protector, she thinks that it should have a slash through the middle.

Without invitation, Kakashi follows her inside. As a gennin, she no longer needs babysitters, but he and Kurenai are the closest things she has to company. Loneliness hurts only slightly less than the nightmares most days. “Well, you’re not _wrong_ ,” he says, scratching the back of his head, “but the principle’s not quite there yet.”

“What do you mean?” She drops her forehead protector on the endtable of the couch next to a couple paper flowers, and heads to the kitchenette. “Do you want anything?”

He makes some vague sound she assumes means no. “You’re right about one thing,” he says. “No one’s invincible. But teamwork isn’t just about finishing the mission. It’s about loyalty to your teammates, too. You’re going to fight better with people you care about. Connections help you work together, and keep you human.”

The glass of water fills nearly to the brim before she thinks of something to say. “That’s not what I learned.”

“Remember who gave you all these great teaching’s yet?” Kakashi’s the only one she’s trusted enough to explain she remembers close to nothing. When she shakes his head, he continues, “Amegakure’s used to being a warzone. It’s not right, and they don’t deserve it, but developing an impersonal attitude was something of a collective coping mechanism.”

“How’s that fair?”

“It’s not.”

She sips her water, and it’s so cold it burns. “Kaito-sensei’s afraid of me.”

Looking her dead in the face, any sense of casual exchange gone, Kakashi tells her, “You have Orochimaru’s cursed seal, Sasuke. A lot of people will be.”

Even if it means getting a scratch in her forehead protector, and having all of Konoha do a lot more than fear her, she _will_ get her revenge on Orochimaru. She tries to ignore that the thought of disappointing Kakashi leaves her with a rotten feeling already.

 

 

When Itachi blocked her memories, he blocked her ability to care as much as she has to right to, and Sasuke quickly discovers a problem with her plan to potentially go missing-nin other than Kakashi. Yuki and Kichiro are too nice, but they aren’t afraid to attack during training just because she’s a girl, and she likes them both more than she should.

By the time they get their first C-ranking mission outside the walls, the Konoha forehead protector is weightless a thing to wear. “Aren’t you a little young?” Isamu, a Daimyo’s youngest son, and therefore least important, asks, eyeing her warily.

Kichiro throws an arm around her shoulders, disregarding personal space. It’s noon, but the clouds are covering the sun, dulling the red of his hair. “This is Uchiha Sasuke,” he says, and Isamu’s eyes widen slightly in recognition of the name. “You can’t be in safer hands than Team Ten, Isamu-san.”

“Uchiha?” he says, and glances to Kaito. “I thought the whole family, you know.”

Over the past couple of months, any hesitation Kaito-sensei had towards her has faded, and now he smiles at her, though it’s faint. “No, there’s still Sasuke,” he says. “She’s keeping up the family legacy.”

“Yeah, which means in a couple of years, we’ll have to be fighting off potential suitors,” Yuki says, elbowing her in the side, and Isamu smiles, too.

“Fine, fine, sorry I doubted you, Sasuke-chan,” he says, raising his hands in quick defeat. “Forgive me?”

She says she will, of course, and the incident’s forgotten. After a while, Kichiro drops his arm, and the clouds clear, elongating shadows, clearing the air.

 

 

Today Uchiha Sasuke turns eleven, and Team Ten gets ambushed on a C-ranking, noncombatant mission just inside the perimeter of the village nearest Konoha. “Look at her eyes, men,” one of the Tani-nin say as the six circle the team on some dusty, deserted abandoned road just out of sight of any village building. “I think we’ve found the Harbinger of Amegakure. Defected, did you, little girl?”

The boys box her in before she can answer, their shoes kicking up dirt, and it hasn’t rained for days. “She’s a loyal kunoichi of Konoha,” Yuki says, holding his kunai out in front of him. “Try to get her, and you have to fight all of us, too.”

When the first two Tani-nin lunge, Sasuke moves by instinct, and her hands fly into seals she doesn’t remember learning. Yuki relies on kunai and string, using his kicks and elbow thrusts as backup for enemies who get too close; Kichiro comes from a clan, with his family jutsu based on wind-based attacks he barely understands, but are strong enough to kick up dirt and dust and leaves, and obscure their opponents’ vision. Kaito-sensei, as a jounin, can wield nature transformation ninjutsu Sasuke’s never seen before, combining wind and fire to create something new.

Sasuke has no origami paper on her, but she has explosive tags, and she’s a Uchiha, which means fire’s in her blood. Her chakra infuses with the paper, twisting it into the shapes of shuriken and hardening the edges into something sharper than normal blades. When she releases them, letting them spin, they’re no longer attached to her, but the chakra means they’re still connected, and she controls their movements the way someone must have taught her. With her Sharingan, no dirt or debris can affect her. The tags avoids her team, but explode on impact with her designated target, sending smoke and the smell of burning skin into the air.

After Kaito-sensei gets one of them down with a well placed, simple kick to the face, and she hits another with a genjutsu manipulating whatever his best memory is into something rivaling his worst, someone else calls retreat. Yuki throws one of his kunai, successfully wrapping the string around a Tani-nin’s knees, and knocks him over. His companions don’t wait around long enough to try and win him back, despite saving the other two.

Kaito-sensei orders them to be on guard, then wraps the Tani-nin on rope and pulls him up, pressing the tip of a kunai to his jugular. “Why did you attack us?” Kaito-sensei asks, and the other man looks over his shoulder, directly to her.

“Don’t you know who she is?” the man answers. “Never help a blind girl find her way home, because then her eyes will turn red, and you’ll be dead soon after. Where’s your follow-up, girl?”

There’s no recollection of ever getting called the Harbinger of anything. Her teammates turn to her, fear in their eyes for the first time, and she thinks about origami. She thinks about twisting into paper hawks, and flying somewhere faraway.

“Why are you so close to Konoha?” Kaito-sensei asks, and she’s relieved he’s ignoring to question for now. “What business do you have here?”

The man doesn’t answer. Instead he bites his tongue in the form of a stereotype she didn’t know existed in real life, and dies with blood dripping from his mouth.

 

 

They don’t talk about it, even though they should, and Sasuke experiments with chakra and paper and jutsu she only half-remembers learning. Training with Kakashi she used to practice the Sharingan, and anything else she played safe, keeping it to what she knows can be explained away by Itachi teaching her. Once she lets go of that, she taps into a new range of knowledge she can’t explain having.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Kichiro tells her one afternoon at the training grounds, leaning his elbow on her shoulder, “but origami’s kind of cool. Where’d you learn this?”

At night, Sasuke dreams of a woman with purple hair, and soft grey eyes, or a man with a face like a fish standing by her brother, his skin bluer than the Ame floods. They don’t have names yet, but it’s not unusual now for Sasuke to wake up with tears on her cheeks. “The Sharingan lets me record any technique,” she answers. “It’s a different sort of memory than my normal memory, which is why I can use it without actually remembering where I picked it up.”

“So you mean it could’ve been anywhere?” he asks.

Shrugging, she says, “Yeah, pretty much.”

To Kaito-sensei’s surprise, she still does little with fire outside of her family jutsu. She’s too embarrassed to explained to anyone that day by the lake, when smoke caught in her eyes the way it wasn’t meant to for someone like her.

Kichiro moves his elbow off her, and bends down, picking up a stray paper shuriken on the ground. Of everything she’s memorized, this is the technique she’s finding the hardest, as though it was only half-taught, and she still has so much to learn. “Why make them like this?” he asks, holding it gingerly in the middle. “It looks more like a pinwheel without a stick than a shuriken.”

There’s no point in having it look real; this way, it appears feminine and assuming, nonthreatening enough to be the last thing to try and evade, when in reality the points are just as sharp as metal. “Do you know the first rule of stealth, Kichiro-kun?” she says, taking it back, careful not to hurt him.

“What?”

“Make everything dangerous look like it’s not.”

 

 

Only two weeks after Kaito-sensei gives his team the contracts for the chuunin exam, Sasuke finds herself half-unconscious on the bloody grass of a forest clearing, surrounded by the dead. “Huh, Konan was right,” a blonde missing-nin says, kneeling at her side. “Orochimaru really _didn’t_ take you.”

He’s familiar, with hair like a canary wing covering half his face, but no forehead protector tied around his head. “Why’d you kill them?” she asks.

There’s a pause, and then he leans back, sitting on his ankles. “What, like I was going to let Orochimaru kidnap you?” he says as she pulls herself into sitting position, hands slipping in the blood. There were nine fighting, including her, before the missing-nin showed up and killed everyone. Now eight are dead, exploded by clay coming directly from his palms. “How’d Konoha get you again? Doesn’t matter now, you can tell me on the road. We should get you home before you bleed out.”

When he reaches out for her, she backs up, and her hand lands on Yuki’s, hot and charred and bloody. She looks up, and there’s the missing-nin, and his hand with its hole is trying to grab her shoulder.

“No!” She stands, nearly tripping backwards over her teammate’s body, and just barely moves out of the way. Birds of prey circle above them, silent, waiting for her to die, too. “My home is Konoha. I don’t even know who you are.”

The vaguely excitement he had on his face disappears, and the forest sways around her, dulling. Her Sharingan’s faded. “Your eyes,” he says as he stands, too. “But those are Itachi’s—what did they do to you? Aw, come on, it’s me, Sasuke-chan! Your brother’s greatest rival. I taught you taijutsu, threatened to blow up that examiner for being a dick to you. You’ve got to remember something.”

He’s young, she realizes, probably about the same age as Itachi would be. “I don’t know,” she says, trying to take another step back, and hitting her foot against an enemy-nin’s hip. “Come any closer, and I’ll attack.”

“Can you see?”

“Yes!” She pulls out a kunai, a real one, and holds it in front of her. There’s blood on her hands, under her nails, and it’s like when she killed her brother all over again. “I mean it. I’ll kill you.”

Even as she says it, she knows it’s useless. A kunai wielded by an exhausted little girl won’t do anything against a man who can kill eight people in just a couple of attacks. With an exaggerated sigh, he says, “You used to be a work of art, kid. Eh, someone’ll know how to fix you. Sorry about this.”

As he lifts his hand again, clay at the ready, she’s hit by a sudden burst of nervous adrenaline, enough to push her not just to her normal Sharingan, but straight into the Mangekyo. “Aw, fuck,” the missing-nin says, and she thinks, _Go away_.

The first thing she’s aware of is the flames, black as the sky in her dreams.

The second is the pain.

 

 

For her own safety, Sasuke tells no one about the blonde missing-nin, making out the men Orochimaru sent after her sound much stronger than they were instead.

“They killed Kaito-sensei first,” she said three days after she returns, which was the first she spent awake, in a hospital bed in a solitary room on the three floor. “Two kept me, Yuki, and Kichiro distracted, and the other three—anyway, Yuki and Kichiro were killed pretty easily after that, but Kaito-sensei had taken out one, and I used an explosive tag to kill another, but then they were getting closer, and there were three of them, and I just. I don’t know. I don’t know where I got the energy for Amaterasu, but I did.”

That was nearly month ago. Since then, she’s been keeping to her apartment as much as possible, sleeping when she can manage, living off what she made during her short time with her team. For all her thoughts of running away and becoming a missing-nin to find what she left in Amegakure, her nightmares are proof that that’s no longer an option. She _will_ kill Orochimaru; she’s more certain of this than ever. Half of Konoha walks on eggshells around her, still unsure of where her loyalties lie, because she’s Uchiha Sasuke, the girl who disappeared for two and a half years only to return covered in blood with her brother’s eyes.

Before she can kill Orochimaru, though, she first needs to leave her room. Enough dust’s built up that it’s visible on the rare occasion she turns on a light. Origami’s stopped cluttering every flat surface, instead ending up on string, now hanging from her bedroom ceiling. Someone once told her that if she were to make a thousand paper cranes in a year, a wish would come true. Normally Sasuke isn’t much of a believer in superstition, but with her team gone, no one knows what to do with her, and her opportunity to avenge them, and Itachi, is slipping away more steadily by the day. The cranes have turned her ceiling into an curtain of color, fluttering in the breeze whenever her window is open, making the sound of pinwheels turning, of kunai cutting through the wind.

Sometimes she thinks about blinding herself again, just to make the world go away for a few hours at a time.

The knock on the door is sudden, and unexpected, and she startles, nearly falling from her bed. There aren’t many people who can sneak up on her, even from moderate distances, and of those, there’s only one who visits her. There’s only one person who visits her, period.

“Now’s not the time, Kakashi-san,” she calls, loud enough that he’ll hear her, and pulls the blanket over her head.

Without pause, he answers, “I’m one of the ones with a key, remember, kid? I’ll drag you out if I have to.”

All the jounin who used to regularly check up on her had gotten keys, and she should’ve known Kakashi hadn’t thrown his away. She’s been avoiding him as thoroughly as everyone else, and doesn’t want him to see the state of her, or her apartment. At least when she blind, she never had to look in the mirror, and confront how much of a mess she is.

He’ll follow through with his threat, though, and she knows it, so she pulls herself out of bed. When she opens the door, he’s leaning casually against the frame as usual, fully dressed in his jounin gear with the bells for his gennin testing at his waist. She’s still in her pajamas, a pair of black shorts and a yellow shirt that don’t suit her, but Kurenai bought for her anyway. With her disheveled, loose hair, and wrinkled clothes, she’s sure the way he raises his eyebrow at her is entirely justified.

“I’ve got good news,” he says, letting himself in. “The Sandaime originally wanted to tell you himself, but I asked for permission to do it instead. You ready?”

She says, “I can’t wait,” and the frown on her face deepens of its own accord.

“Your enthusiasm is touching,” he says as she shuts the door. “Anyway, down to business. Yesterday, I got my usual team of three potential gennin, but one got pulled by his parents this morning for a series of complicated, ridiculous reasons. You need a team. I’m also the only other one with a Sharingan, and what you did was enough what to get attention. What do say? Are you willing to be my first ever gennin, or do you want to stay in your pajamas until eleven and eat one meal a day?”

For a long moment, she’s quiet, thinking it through, because this isn’t just anyone. This is Kakashi, and he’s the one who found her in the middle of the bodies and the fire that burned for seven days and seven months. “I got my last team killed,” she says finally. “Are you really going to put your new one at risk like that?”

“It’s not your fault,” he says, which he’s told her a hundred times, and he can tell her a thousand more and she’ll never believe it. “That was all Orochimaru. And I’m more prepared than Kaito was. It won’t happen again.”

Again, she’s quiet. Then she says, “I need to shower and dress first.”

He grins, visible even through his mask, crinkling the corner of his eye. “I’ll even treat you to breakfast,” he says as he flicks on the main room light. “Just don’t tell anyone.”

With that, he walks past her, and settles himself on her couch, pulling out his book. “Kakashi-sensei,” she says, and he peeks over the edge, eyebrow raised again. “Nevermind.”

Though it’ll take some getting used to, she knows she’ll be able to say it comfortably eventually. For now, it’s the closest to a thank you that he’s going to get.

 _I’m Uchiha Sasuke_ , she thinks, _and I’m a loyal Konoha gennin_.

That’ll take some time to get used to, too, but Itachi gave her his eyes, and sent her here for a reason. His death was as much her fault as Team Ten’s, and if it’s loyalty they all want, then she owes them that much, at least. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The second bout of adrenaline that let her use the Mangekyo Sharingan, despite not having the chakra for it even normally, was due to the cursed seal. I just couldn't figure out how to put it in there since it's not as though she had time to realize that. 
> 
> Also! I'm thinking of turning this into a series based on requests because I'm bored. Thoughts?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [where civilization ends](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3762016) by [Shayna_Nak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayna_Nak/pseuds/Shayna_Nak)




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